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Dropbox and direct links

During some refactoring of AzureCopy I’ve decided to finally add Azure CopyBlob support for Dropbox. This means that locally you can run a command to copy from Dropbox to Azure Blob Storage and none of the traffic actually goes through where AzureCopy is running, huge bandwidth/speed savings!

The catch is that it appears (I’ve NOT fully confirmed this yet) that Azure CopyBlob doesn’t like redirection URLs, which is what I was receiving from Dropbox. I was generating a “shared” URL for a particular Dropbox file which in turn generates an HTTP 302 redirection and then gives me the real URL. Azure CopyBlob doesn’t play friendly with this. The trick is to NOT generate a “shared” URL but to generate a “media” URL. Quoting from the Dropbox API documentation: “Similar to /shares. The difference is that this bypasses the Dropbox webserver, used to provide a preview of the file, so that you can effectively stream the contents of your media.”

Once I made that change, hey presto, no more redirects and Azure CopyBlob is now a happy little ummm “thing”.

Upshot is now I can migrate a tonne of data from Dropbox to Azure without using up any of my own bandwidth.